


In a Strange Land

by Umbralpilot



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: A lot angstier than the summary suggests, F/F, First Kiss, Gratuitous Pharah adoration, Holidays, It's traditional, Jewish Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, Post-Fall of Overwatch, There is Chinese food though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 10:10:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12130188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: It's Christmas, so Angela and Fareeha get Chinese food.





	In a Strange Land

**Author's Note:**

> What is the Overwatch timeline We Just Don't Know.

“I heard it’s traditional,” Fareeha says, apologetic, holding out the bag of Chinese takeaway to Angela at the doorway.

Angela doesn’t immediately respond. Fareeha shifts a little uncomfortably, like she thinks the other woman disapproves. But Angela is arrested by the way the cold brings dark warm colour to Fareeha’s cheeks, by the tousling of her short hair out from under the rim of her beanie, the solidity and softness of her in her winter clothes. It’s Christmas, and all the apartments around Angela’s are decorated with colourful lights and the tangles of snowflakes and pine. Daisy chained ribbons dance in the falling white down. The bag in Fareeha’s hand smells of chilli, coriander and five-spice. She holds it out like a temple offering.

Angela feels like she’s waking from something when she finally meets Fareeha’s hopeful eyes. “It is in New York,” she says with a chuckle, and they are in New York, so she sees Fareeha relax. “Come on in. I have the punch keeping warm. Non-alcoholic - fruit,” she adds after a moment, over her shoulder, and sees Fareeha relax a little more.

Fareeha smiles. She comes in. She puts the bag down carefully on Angela’s coffee table, which Angela has cleared of papers.  Then she wants to stop smiling, Angela can see, but she tries anyway. Her mouth crooks, the tip of her tongue against the edge of her teeth. Angela quickly hands her a cup of hot punch.

There are no patterns here. Everything is first. The first time they come together for Christmas, with each other, with anyone, since Zurich. Since Overwatch.

“Happy Hannukah?” Fareeha tries, faltering already on the word despite her excellent pronunciation as she glances around and fails to find a single candle.

Angela coughs on a bit of punch. “It falls in January this year.”

“Oh.” Fareeha looks mortified. Then adds: “Eid was in April.”

Now Angela finds it’s her turn to smile crookedly. Wrong time for both of them. Not quite fitting. Not quite right. “Well,” she says, “it’s still Christmas, and we have Chinese food.”

She refuses to keep standing awkwardly around the table while the punch and takeaway are both getting cold, and Fareeha boils in her coat in the carefully wrapped and padded warmth of Angela’s apartment. She goes to the kitchen, finds the usual cups and plates, the usual cutlery and snacks that mark their meetings, surprising, then an anchor of her days since she’s taken up research at Columbia and Fareeha had been attached to the Egyptian Consulate. Almost six months. Almost a year since Fareeha enlisted. Almost fifteen months since Angela returned to practicing. Almost twenty since Zurich. The first Christmas Angela had barely noticed the holiday. The first Hannukah she hadn’t left her house. She’d not noted Eid in her calendar, after. Too many empty days.

Fareeha brightens at the suggestion of routine. She puts her coat, her scarf and her beanie aside, and starts taking out containers. In the gold late-night winter light of Angela’s apartment, melting snowflakes glitter in her hair. She puffs the cushions on Angela’s second-hand couch, flicks the television on, and makes a face at the carollers.

“There isn’t going to be anything else,” Angela notes, amused, as she comes in with her handful of plates and chopsticks. “It’s Christmas.”

Fareeha groans. “If I could go one day without hearing these words from everyone I meet…”

“ _Tschuldigung_.” Angela smiles. She knows exactly how it is. She hardly resent it, but it’s still like wearing a shirt that chafes just a little bit. A tiny sense of not fitting. Something just a little bit not right.

She takes her time opening the containers while Fareeha zaps from channel to channel. Variety show, shredded duck. A holiday address, vegetarian chop sui. More carols, chicken feet. She can’t claim to understand the chicken feet, but Fareeha’s picked it up from Liao, just as she’d picked up pickled herring from Torbjorn, mince pies from Lena, an insatiable lust for alfajores from Gabriel. All of those things are as much a part of her as her soldier’s bearing, and Angela is unreasonably happy to have a plateful of the last hidden in the kitchen and ready to indulge her. Maybe she gives what she can, to make remembrance taste sweet.

She can’t help but smile again when Fareeha puts down the remote with a sigh, having settled on an almost muted live report from the partying in Times Square. “We can always put something on through the internet.”

“Too late.” Fareeha’s moan is the long-suffering sort. “I’ve been inundated. It’s in my head. You know I used to love Christmas movies? The soppier the better?”

Angela mulls that over through a mouthful of shredded duck. “It’s very you,” she says undiplomatically.

“It was Jesse’s fault. He loved them even more.” Fareeha gets the smile of younger sisters across times and cultures. “His favourite was the old one where this man has to become the new Santa Claus because he killed the old one or something. I mostly remember it had a lot of father-son bonding.”

“It’s very… him,” Angela reflects, straight-faced around the brilliant burst of Szechuan pepper and honey in her mouth. Fareeha throws her head back and the golden beads in her hair frame her laugh. For a moment Angela feels it, brilliant and golden.

Too quickly, it’s embers in the fireplace. They sit on the couch and remember, each too much in her own world to fit quite right with the other’s bubble full of yesterday.

“ _Ummi_ used to say that Christmas movies ruin American kids,” Fareeha says quietly, when a sputter of premature party crackers from Times Square breaks the silence. “She said she was happiest when another holiday fell on Christmas, so she could get all the rest of them out of the danger zone. I remember the time Eid was on Christmas Eve and she sat me down on to watch an Egyptian melodrama with Jack and Gabriel.”

“She always was pleased when Christmas and Hannukah coincided.” It’s a strangely small thing to remember, but Angela can call it up crystal-clear. Maybe it’s because Ana and her daughter look so much alike, it’s easy to remember one when looking at the other, even when it isn’t quite the same, not quite. “I remember her telling Reinhardt he can’t have mettwurst that Christmas, because I was celebrating too.”

Fareeha snorts. “Like you’d have minded.”

“Maybe I minded a little,” Angela says, small voice, small shrug. It’s hard to think she’d have minded anything from Reinhardt or the others, now.

Fareeha chews her water chestnut, contemplating. She gestures with her chopsticks as she speaks. “I used not to care,” she says, just as quietly as Angela despite the movements of the utensils. “Maybe because I knew… when we were all together, it was easy to know… where you stood. With everything.”

Her swallow, when it comes, is a little hard. Angela nods. It’s a familiar refrain of their meetings, for all that every time Fareeha comes by she seems to have another achievement, another honour to the long scroll of her shared name. “Have you decided what to do with the fast command track offer yet?”

“I want to take it,” Fareeha says immediately, too fast to be truly committed. “Maybe it’s the closest I’ll come.”

Angela watches her, the studding of steel in her back even as she sprawls on the couch, the youth and yearning in the fall of her hair from the tilt of her head. When she squints her eyes, Fareeha glows faintly in the reflected river of lights from the street, the echoes of fireworks from the TV screen. “You shouldn’t settle for something just because it’s close enough, Fareeha.”

“I know,” Fareeha says low. She ducks her head. Her hair falls in her eyes. She raises head again and throws it back. “What about you, Ange? Are you taking the UN grant?”

The slice of duck on Angela’s tongue tastes bitter. The papers, she recalls, are the ones she’d cleared off the coffee table just before Fareeha’s arrival. Where had she put them? There’s so much on the desk in her home office. More on the desk in her actual office. Everyone wants to give her a grant. Most academics, in any field, would want to murder her. Less than a year and a half since she’d resumed practicing. Less than two years since Zurich.

She also swallows. “It’s too soon.”

“Angie, you’ve been saying that for months…”

“They’re the same people who worked on the Petras Commission, Fareeha. I know what they think of me…”

“Who cares what they think? You know who you are no matter what, right?” Fareeha stops, tries to soothe over the heat in her voice with another crooked grin. “Otherwise you might as well start watching Christmas movies with everyone else.”

“I can live with ones about Santa Claus getting murdered,” Angela murmurs, and for a moment, they find again: the warmth, the clarity. Fareeha laughs. Angela laughs. They know where they stand, together.

Outside, below one of the neighbours’ windows, a group of carollers settle. They aren’t bad, Angela thinks, consoling almost in their harmony, though no matter how soft, the songs they sing aren’t for her. Fareeha glances at the window. Rather than groan, her face works through sudden brittleness. Angela wonders where Fareeha had been last Eid.

There’s so much Chinese food spread out on the table. The punch glasses haven’t needed refilling. They’ve tried so hard to have a feast, but this first time is too raw, they feel its alienness too keenly.

Angela catches Fareeha’s eyes. In them she sees Fareeha’s brittleness mirrored in her own face.

“This isn’t quite it, is it,” she whispers. “None of it really fits.”

Fareeha looks down. The light is glorious in her hair as it shades her face. Her lips are full with spice, and she isn’t smiling. “No,” she answers. “None of it belongs to us.”

Angela doesn’t have to ask; neither of them does. She feels the press of it around them and worming its way between them, this foreign holiday, this foreign city, these foreign lives for foreign hopes. They come together, and none of it really fits, none of it fits anymore. They come as close as they can, and everything seems open. They should be able to find themselves again. Yet here they are, huddling together around this foreignness.

They know who they are.

She’d been thinking of it for weeks, months since she’d first met Fareeha again, the woman that had bloomed out of the youth she’d known when she was so young herself. Now she can’t think anymore. She needs the gold of those moments close to her, their warmth while the snow falls. She needs to keep something of herself, for herself.

Angela leans across the couch, and tips Fareeha’s face towards her for a kiss.

As soon as she does, she realizes Fareeha was about to do the exact same thing, and her heart and stomach both leap into her throat in a terror of joy and affirmation. She’s made so many mistakes, and it’s been less than two years since Zurich, since Overwatch. But here she is reached for, she answers and is answered. Fareeha kisses her with the stumbling hunger of someone who had just found out they were going to live. She prickles of five-spice and soothes of honey. The carollers have gone and the world is silent, muffled with revelation and snowfall.

They drink of each other. They come apart. They come together again. They lean their brows together and Angela’s hands tremblingly explore Fareeha’s face, her fingers, her neck. Fareeha sits with both hands clinging to the front of Angela’s shirt, as though stunned into the certainty that if she lets go, Angela would fly away.

 “Oh, _mein schatz_ …” Angela breathes out. “Oh, I’m so glad you… I’m so glad…”

She realizes her own hands are shaking, her sure surgeon’s hands that have never known doubt until that day, less than two years ago. She thinks Fareeha might be crying. She can’t steady her fingers, and wipes at Fareeha’s cheeks with almost terrified, reverent tenderness.

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” Fareeha breathes out, hoarse, sniffling. “Angie, I’ve been thinking about you so much and I didn’t know if it’s because I really wanted you or I thought you could really want _me_ or because you were all that was left…”

“I want you. _Meine leibe_. I do.  Not because – because of _you_ , Fareeha. Because of who you are now.” Now, in the present, this world, this life. Not the one that ended. “Not because of Overwatch.”

And they’d spoken many names that evening, and many others before, but it’s this one that loosens it at last. They feel the grief between them: grief for others’ lives lost, and for their own lives, come loose from their moorings and no longer quite fitting, lives in which they are foreign to even themselves. But when Angela cries it’s not only because of her last Hannukah spent alone, but because of the one that is coming. The one that doesn’t have to be.

Through the grief, as Fareeha holds her and she nestles into Fareeha, her mind spins: the compass needle whirls away from _two years ago,_ on to the possibility of _one month from now_.

It’s almost too much, that hope. She almost fears to touch it, fears snowflakes melting on her hand. She looks up. There are still tears on Fareeha’s face, but they also seem to glow. Angela tilts her head up and kisses their trail.

“Is this right?” she asks, shy and longing. “Does this fit?”

“It fits,” Fareeha says, and her crooked smile is golden. “It’s just right.”


End file.
